Just curious if anyone has any good recommendations of settings for running FreeBSD under VMware ESXi 5.1 with PCI(e) pass through enabled. I have been doing some initial testing with a new motherboard processor and RAM. That I am hoping to be able to run 3 Servers on.

The intended virtual machines for the setup.
1.) A FreeBSD system to run Bacula, which will require PCI pass through for an eSATA drive dock so backups volumes can be Rotated. 2.) A FreeBSD system to host my web/email server, no pass through required. 3.) A FreeNAS box host SMB shares and iSCSI, will use a PCI pass through to allow direct access to 4 Hard drives, attached to a separate SATA controller.

Current Hardware Information:
eSATA Controller for backups: Koutech IO-PESA111 PCI Express SATA II (3.0Gb/s) - uses Silicon Image 3132 Chipset
System Board:  ASUS F2A85-M PRO FM2 AMD A85X (Hudson D4)
CPU: AMD A10-5800K Trinity 3.8GHz (4.2GHz Turbo) Socket FM2 100W Quad-Core Desktop APU (CPU + GPU) RAM: CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)

I still need to add an additional controller SATA controller for the FreeNAS VM, but so far testing with a new machine built for the Bacula install has only been consistently able to trigger a complete core dump and crash of the ESXi host machine, sometimes at boot of the VM with PCI pass through, sometimes not until a load has been applied to the external hard drive on the Pass through SATA controller.

I have tried the following things to fix this that I have come across while searching for help.

Added the following to /boot/loader.conf:
  hw.pci.enable_msi=0
  hw.pci.enable_msix=0

Added the following to the Vmware Virtual Machine Configuration:
  pciPassthru0.msiEnabled = "FALSE"

--
Thanks,
   Dean E. Weimer
   http://www.dweimer.net/
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